domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

I think it’s officially autumn. I keep finding cats under blankets, in laundry piles, and sleeping like sardines.

It’s gotten cold enough that all the windows are shut, and tonight we have a frost warning–apparently we’re meant to drop down to 34. I’m delighted–autumn and winter are my favorite seasons. Summer wasn’t bad this year, but I can’t imagine a world in which I’d pick even the mildest summer over winter.

Because I’m cheap, we haven’t yet turned on the heat, though I suspect we’ll have to at least test it out soon. The first year that Nick and I were living together, we didn’t turn on the heat until the night we got home from work to find that you could see your breath in the living room. So I reluctantly turned on the heat, only to discover that the furnace wasn’t working. Whups. Luckily it was a rental, so we weren’t the ones stuck paying for emergency services, but the experience has convinced me to test out the heat before it gets so cold that lack of heat means wearing winter jackets to bed.

Despite the impending heating bills, I’m excited. Summer drives me crazy. Everything smells like bugs and sticky, and it never stops being light out, and everything feels too close. Autumn, though, smells like leaves and snow, and at night, instead of the relentless buzzing and chittering of cicadas and grasshoppers, it’s got train whistles and wind, and it seems like the world goes on forever.

The best part of that is that in the cooler months, we don’t really have to go places. There’s no frantic rush to visit seventeen parks and go swimming and take a hike and pick berries and and and, because it’s too cold for that and it’s probably raining or snowing anyhow. I hate leaving the house, so it’s always exciting when we hit weather that requires movie-watching, evenings spent in bed with a book, and warm drinks. We’ll curl up in bed and make cocoons, and we won’t have to emerge until spring.